Just ran into this so I figured I’d post the solution I had to figure out myself.

After making a new project, Visual Studio will appear to not open it, so you’ll be tempted to go and open it. Don’t, check the status bar first. It is probably generating an analysis file. If you try and open the project when it is doing this, Visual Studio will error out and close your solution.

In the spirit of the The Case of the… blog posts by Mark Russinovich, I am going to post about a particularly vexing problem I had over the past few days.

It all started when I decided I wanted to try out the latest public build of the Windows 10 Technical Preview, that being build 9879. I installed to VHD (it’s not really relevant to this story so I won’t go into details; it’s very easy to test and clean up while booting from a VHD though) and made sure my bootloader was configured to natively boot from the VHD. Then I rebooted.

I had some weird issues with setting everything up in Windows 10 but I figured I would resolve them the next day… I should have started earlier. I put the system to sleep and went to bed.

At 4:45am my computer spontaneously woke up, waking me up. It sat on a “Recovery” screen complaining it could not load winload.exe. I did not want to deal with this at 4:45am on a Sunday and so hard powered the system off.

Next morning, powered the system on… I was met with the same screen.

Whatever, Windows 10 ate itself, I’ll just boot back into Windows 7. Thankfully even though this screen shows up before the Windows 8/10 GUI bootloader, it helpfully has an option to boot from the next OS instead. I chose it.

Windows 7 boots… and most of my desktop/taskbar icons are missing, most startup programs are missing, and the ones that do run either crash or scream at me that something on my second hard drive can’t be found.

I open My Computer… and two of my hard drives are gone. Disk Management… not there either. Device Manager… nope.

I have found a solution to this issue that doesn’t seem to be listed on the official support page. I sent them a form thingy to add it, but regardless I think I will post it here too in order to get it spidered by Google.

First, check out that page and make sure you’ve tried the solutions listed, especially unplugging the power supply for 90 seconds. You probably don’t need to do it that long, but unplug both ends and let it sit anyway.

If it still won’t power on when you plug everything back in, unplug the power cable from the Wii, and then unplug your video cable. Plug the power cable back in and power on. If it works, plug the video cable back in.

This probably hit me due to having a weird setup with a third-party Wii->DVI cable (which surprisingly handles 720p, but it’s also a PS3->DVI cable too) and a DVI KVM switch, plus my dad was fiddling with live electrical wiring on the same circuit-thing today. So yeah.

Anyway that might help someone else, maybe.

Addendum: I just hit this problem again, with the official HDMI cable this time. Not sure how it resolved this time, but I would check ventilation to ensure the unit is not sitting on a carpet and to let it sit, plugged in, overnight.

Addendum Addendum: Problem ended up getting worse over the months, eventually the Wii U was dead and I had to pay $200 to get it repaired (one of the boards was bad). Moral of the story: Send it in while your warranty is still good. Also use the copy feature to backup your saves before it dies.

Not just a version bump this time, but mostly small changes. I’m experimenting with Chrome SxS mode which disables the “default browser” feature (so, ideal for GCP) and uses some different registry keys I have to hook. Strangely if I don’t hook the non-Chrome-SxS keys too, Chrome breaks, so I have to hook them all. Oh well.